The True Impact of Social Analytics on B2B Funnels

For B2B sales and marketing teams, few metaphors are as powerful as the sales funnel.

It’s an almost supernatural, multilayered vortex that draws leads from the wider world and then pulls them down to close. At the top of the funnel (TOFU) are fresh new leads who are currently discovering your offers. In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) are leads interested in learning more. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are the leads ready and ready to make a purchase.

Modeling your sales funnel so you can better target and nurture leads at every level is critical to increasing your conversion rate. However, for accurate modeling, you need a lot of reliable data. An important way to collect this data is through your social media tools.

The importance of social media in marketing is beyond question. Companies that market on social media are 40% more likely to meet their sales goals. Plus, a whopping 95% of shoppers buy from sellers who provide content that addresses their concerns and questions at every level of the sales funnel – and a lot of that content is posted on social platforms these days.

However, the question remains: How can you measure and analyze the real impact of social activities on your sales funnel?

Learn what social media data is and how you can use that data to power your B2B sales funnels.

What is social media data?

Social media data (or social analytics – the terms are interchangeable) contain all the information that comes from the activity of visitors, prospects and leads on your social media channels. Any data that you receive when someone interacts with your profile or content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other social media channel is considered social data.

Specific metrics can vary from platform to platform. However, they all have the following social data points in common:

• Shares / reposts
• Likes
• Remarks
• Mentions
• Impressions
• Conversions
• Clicks

Clicks can be the most insightful of all social data points. Many external factors can determine which post a visitor wants to comment on or share. Click metadata can tell you what types of content to explore further.

Why is social media data important to B2B funnels?

Without raw data, you cannot analyze the effectiveness of your B2B social media marketing efforts. With so many marketing activities and steps in the buyer’s journey on social media, analytics without social data is not going to produce a lot of useful insights.

Social analytics can help you answer some important questions about whether your social media activities can help you achieve your goals. With analytics, you can answer questions like:

• Which social media platforms generate the most leads?
• What kind of content is driving our audience to click, share, and convert the most?
• What are our top conversion posts?
• Are our audiences more interested in TOFU, MOFU or BOFU content?

By analyzing the right social data, you can learn what works and what doesn’t – and then tailor your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

How Social Media Data Affects Your B2B Funnels

Many aspects of the marketing, sales, and product development processes flow into the modeling of your sales funnel. The goal is to create a funnel that effectively addresses your buyers’ needs and brings them closer to completing a sale. Within this process there are two critical areas where analyzing social data is particularly beneficial.

1. Enrichment of lead

Lead enrichment includes adding, correcting and normalizing your data on a lead. The goal is to create a more detailed, up-to-date, and accurate picture of who your leads are and what they want. You can automate lead enrichment by importing third-party data into your CRM. You can also achieve the same result by doing manual research and reviews on leads.

The enrichment of lead makes it easy to perform several related functions that improve the efficiency of your sales funnel. These are:

Lead scoring

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How do you know which leads want to buy and which are just looking for? The solution is to quantify their signs of interest, assign them a score, and rank them.

The lead enrichment process ensures that you don’t miss any essential information about your lead, such as: B. whether they are decision-makers in their company. Social data can provide clues to their signs of interest, as evidenced by the interactions on the social media pages.

Lead segmentation

A head start with a low score shouldn’t necessarily be ignored. However, a low-scoring lead may require different levels of attention or types of content.

The same applies to leads with the same interest. If they are in different industries or countries, the same approach may not work for everyone.

Social data can enrich your lead profiles with these details. You can then group your leads into separate audiences so you can target each group with tailored content to address the main concerns of each group.

Maintain lead

You move a lead from one level of your sales funnel to the next by nurturing it.

Lead nurturing is accomplished by providing leads with content that will answer their questions, address their concerns, and generate interest in your offerings. The more data you have about your leads, the more pointers you will have on creating the content that is most likely to engage them.

Lead assignment

It’s great when your most recent lead increases engagement in your sales funnel. However, if you don’t know what motivated them to provide their contact information, download this e-book, or request pricing, then you’re missing out. This type of knowledge is critical to improving your sales processes.

Enriched leads and social data analytics strengthen your attribution models. Lead mapping gives you the best chance to find out which content deserves recognition for conversion.

2. Perfect your messages

The second key area affected by social data is Your messages. Ultimately, all of your content is just a form of communication between you and the buyer.

When your messages are perfect, it hits the right note and addresses your lead’s most pressing concerns – while being entertaining and educational at the same time. Then you know you will do your best to close the sale.

If your messages fall short on these fronts, leads can lose interest and drift away.

How do you perfect your messages? The two easiest ways are to personalize your sales numbers and create more engaging content.

Personalize sales outreach

Social data can tell you what your leads are most interested in and which channels are best for reaching them. You can use this information to personalize your sales performance.

Let’s see how this works in practice. For example, let’s say you have a lead who consistently likes your tweets about a specific feature of your product.

You can use this little data to create a personalized reach. A Twitter DM could be a great way to make a “sales call” – and now you have an even better conversation starter idea.

Create more engaging content

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Content that is activated is critical in moving leads towards conversions. But what kind of content should you create to get more leads?

First, take a step back for a broader view of what your social data is telling you. By measuring how and where your leads are interacting with your sales funnel, you can create more engaging content at all levels.

Let’s say you’re good at moving leads through the MOFU and BOFU, but a lot of them seem to get stuck in the TOFU. The leads that spend most of their time in the TOFU don’t move on down the funnel at sufficiently high rates.

By carefully parsing your social data, you will find that the leads who are slowly escaping the TOFU are very engaging with your video content. This data tells you that you probably want video as a more important part of your TOFU content.

It is true that collecting, organizing, and analyzing raw social data can be overwhelming to begin with, but having the right resources can greatly reduce the difficulty of this endeavor. Tools like Oktopost can help you automate and optimize your social data processes so that you can easily optimize your content at every level of the sales funnel.

By using social data to build better B2B sales funnel models, you get the real impact with higher engagement rates, more conversions, and better ROI.